It was a biggie, actually, but for now that was all the kids needed to hear about it. Once the case showed up on Marliss’s website, however, the news would be all over town, and Joanna would probably have some serious explaining to do as far as Sage and Dennis were concerned.
Chapter 32
Bisbee, Arizona
Friday, December 8, 2023
Stephen Roper awakened that Friday morning feelinggroggy and out of sorts. It had been the longest and worst two weeks of his life. Usually one of his kills was followed by a period of euphoria. Not this time. Instead he’d been living in a nightmare.
For one thing, he’d really overdone it as far as his gimpy shoulder was concerned. Even with pain pills, it kept him awake night after night, but so did worry. For the first time ever, Stephen Roper was afraid of getting caught.
That day in the Free Store when most of the voices had been yelling at him to take the kid, there had been one dissenter—Sherlock. “Don’t do it,” he had warned. “He’s too close to you. You’ll get caught.” But had Stephen paid any attention? He had not. He’d grabbed the kid anyway. When Xavier had let out a yelp of alarm and fought back—Stephen had resorted to banging his head against the edge of the counter hard enough to knock him out.
By rights, Stephen should have killed him then and there, on the floor of the food truck, but he hadn’t dared. He knew from experience that manual strangulation takes time, and he was afraid one of the Free Store’s regular customers might come wandering inside. Instead, Stephen had secured Xavier with duct tape—binding his arms and legs and slapping more of the tape over his mouth—before folding the still unconscious boy into a plastic tote and hiding that behind the counter long enough for him to close up shop and head for the border.
He’d been approaching the crossing when he realized the backs of both hands were bleeding. In the course of that brief but fierce struggle, the one in which Stephen had reinjured his shoulder, the little bastard had somehow managed to scratch the hell out of the backs of Stephen’s hands. Before reaching the guard shack, he quickly shifted his grip from the sides of the steering wheel to the bottom so the damage wouldn’t be visible.
The guards on the Mexican side sent him through with their customary smile and wave. The guard on the American side wanted to chat.
“So Señor Santa is leaving early today?” he asked, as Stephen rolled down the window.
“I’m a little under the weather,” Stephen told him.
“Take care then,” the guard told him. “Feel better.”
Stephen had barely driven away from the crossing when the kid came to and began kicking the hell out of the inside of the tote, rocking it back and forth and sending it shooting out from behind the counter. It was all Stephen could do to keep driving. It was only a matter of a few minutes from the crossing to his place on Country Club Drive, but with the kid raising hell, it had seemed to take forever. Once the truck was parked next to his house, Stephen had pounced on the tote, ripped off the lid, and put the damned kid out of his misery right then and there, but instead of feeling a sense of triumph, Stephen Roper was experiencing something he’d never encountered before—outright terror!
He had broken one of his cardinal rules—he’d murdered someone literally in his own yard. He’d gotten away with doing that once long ago with Grandma Lucille. In that instance the cops had turned up and taken the body away. This time getting rid of the body would be Stephen’s problem, and it was a big one.
For one thing, he hadn’t been wearing gloves, so his DNA wouldbe all over Xavier’s body. He knew that bleach was the only way to get rid of DNA, and he happened to have a gallon and a half of that already on hand. At least he wouldn’t have to go on a late-night shopping trip to Safeway and end up being caught on video picking up an emergency supply.
He’d had to wait until dark before he could bring the kid inside. Initially he tried using the tote, but with his shoulder on fire, that was a nonstarter, so he had stuffed the boy’s body into the sack lunch duffel bag, making the body far easier for him to handle. Now wearing gloves, Stephen set about cleaning up his mess. By the time he’d finished bathing the kid, trimming his fingernails, and redressing him, he’d decided that the only sensible way to get rid of the body was to bury it somewhere far away from his place on Country Club Drive.
In its natural state, dirt in the Sonoran Desert is usually the same consistency as hardened concrete. From that standpoint, digging a grave in the softer sand of a dry wash or riverbed seemed like a plan, and the San Pedro River, just a few miles to the west on Highway 92, was as good a place as any. Stephen was confident that his all-wheel-drive Mercedes would be up to the challenge of getting him there.
It was close to midnight before Stephen had the body along with a pick and shovel loaded into the trunk of the Mercedes. Deciding he needed to unload the plastic tote as well, he took the added precaution of carrying it inside to examine it in the light—and a good thing, too. Sure enough, there were small smears of blood showing on the inside of the tote—no doubt from Stephen’s damaged hands. He scrubbed that in the remaining bleach solution that was still in his bathtub. Then the tote went into the Mercedes’s back seat. As for the duct tape he’d used to secure the kid? That went into a ziplock bag under the driver’s seat.
Stephen had been beyond exhausted when he finally went to bed that night. Even so, he hadn’t slept a wink. Four hours later he staggeredout of bed, dressed, and headed for the San Pedro, bringing along his old camera equipment to provide cover, something that proved to be unnecessary because he never saw a soul.
Unfortunately, just because the sand in the riverbed wasn’t hardpacked didn’t make it easier to dig. For every shovelful he dug out, half that much slipped back into the hole as the sides kept collapsing. It took over an hour for him to hollow out a trench deep enough to cover the kid’s body without leaving behind a telltale, child-size mound. Then, rather than heading home, he drove west through Sierra Vista and then on to Tucson where he dropped the apparently clean tote off at a Goodwill donation center. Then, after downing a Subway sandwich, he stuffed the ziplock holding the incriminating duct tape inside the bag the sandwich had come in and placed that in a trash can located just inside the restaurant’s front door.
Feeling he’d done all he could to cover his tracks, Stephen went home. Knowing the scratch marks were all too visible, the first person he called was Shirley, his friend from church, telling her that he’d just tested positive for Covid, so he for sure wouldn’t be in his regular pew this Sunday and, depending on how things went, maybe not the following one, either.
“Would you like me to come by and drop off some food?” Shirley had asked solicitously.
“No, thanks,” he told her quickly. “Don’t bother. I’ve got everything I need.”
After that, he had settled in to wait. He’d watched the news compulsively—the lead stories, anyway—waiting to hear that a child had been reported missing in Naco, Sonora, but the Tucson stations maintained radio silence on that score. Had Stephen bothered to stay tuned for the “upcoming” weather reports, saying that a fierce storm was bearing down on southern Arizona, he might not have been so surprised by the pummeling rain that hit the area over Thanksgiving weekend.
Once the body showed up, his life got infinitely worse. The Tucsonstations still weren’t running with the story, but Marliss Shackleford was. She was the one who identified the dead child pulled from the San Pedro as Xavier Delgado before anyone else did. And Marliss’s coverage was also how Stephen learned that Joanna Brady’s Sheriff’s Department was in charge of the investigation.
Stephen remembered her from a senior English class at Bisbee High School, back when she was still Joanna Lathrop. As he recalled, she’d done all right in class and probably ended up with either an A- or B+. (The Bisbee School District had still been doing letter grades at the time.) But obviously Joanna hadn’t exactly been focused on schoolwork since she’d managed to get herself knocked up that year and hadn’t been allowed to walk through graduation.
She’d ended up becoming sheriff by a fluke when her first husband, a candidate for sheriff, had been murdered, and she’d been elected by write-in voters. When she had won, Stephen had been appalled. How could someone with no law enforcement experience whatsoever be elected to the office of sheriff? He had thought her winning that first election to be a fluke, but she’d been elected to three subsequent terms, and he had voted against her every time.
He assumed that, if she was running the investigation, it would end up being a ham-fisted, amateurish effort—too bad for her, good for him. Having followed Marliss Shackleford’s many takedowns of Sheriff Brady’s job performance over the years, Stephen was sure he wasn’t the only person in Cochise County who felt that way—even if they were always outvoted.
As his days of self-imposed solitary confinement wore on, Stephen found himself feeling more and more anxious. He may have had a pretend case of Covid, but his loss of appetite was real enough. He barely ate or slept, either, and not only because his shoulder was bothering him. Although the other voices were alarmingly absent, waking or sleeping, Sherlock’s voice was a constant presence, jeering at him for being so stupid, for making such a mess of things, and for thinking that he could somehow skate around this disaster and still get away with it.
